Aimed at RTS and RPG gamers, and with only three buttons, the Krait is the simplest and cheapest mouse in Razer's current range. It features a 1600 DPI optical sensor, that uses infra-red light rather than the traditional bright red. The design is very distinctively Razer with oversized rubber buttons and shimmering glow effect on the semi-transparent side rails and wheel. It's also a very narrow mouse, suitable for left or right-handers.

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The Krait's party piece is HyperResponse buttons that Razer claim are optimised for games requiring fast clicking. The marketing blurb states that the buttons can manage 1200 APM (actions per minute) or 20 clicks per second in plain English.

Razer Krait Response Graph

The thing that jumps out from the response graph is that the response is heavily clipped. However notice the scale of the graph. Perfect Control goes all the way up to a huge 1.78 m/s (70"/s). That's better than any other mouse I had tested so far. I tried overclocking the Krait to see if this cured the clipping of the response, but running the mouse at 1000 Hz did not change its reponse.

After hitting the response cap, the Krait happily continues but does not Malfunction until a truely astonishing speed of 3.84 m/s (151"/s). I actually had to build a bigger pulley specifically to test this mouse and reach this speed. It's way beyond what I would consider an extremely fast mouse flick, and realistically no gamer would ever move the Krait fast enough to cause it to malfunction.

I measured the mouse resolution at the expected value of 1600 DPI.

Razer have produced a truely fantastic mouse with an optical sensor that will not malfunction no matter how much you throw it around. The range of Perfect Control is also excellent, although it does get capped at 1.78 m/s and after that you will experience negative acceleration. With 1600 DPI resolution this mouse trumps most of the Microsoft models for players that prefer high game sensitivity too. For the fashion-conscious LAN gamer the Krait is a good looking mouse, rounding off an excellent package.

Razer claim that this mouse has buttons optimised for fast clickers. Since my tests do not check the mouse buttons I can't confirm whether this is a genuine property of the mouse, and I can't compare it to other mice. The buttons don't have any specific 'feel' that sets them apart from other mice I've tested, and even if they did I would be reluctant to make any conclusions without hard evidence. I have never felt that the buttons on a mouse have stopped me from being able to click fast, and indeed is there even a situation when being able to click 20 times per second would be useful? In future articles I will have to devise a machine to properly test the microswitches on mice, but any verdict on buttons will have to be put on hold until then.